"Strike Hard" and the Mass Internment Camps

From “Strike Hard” to the camps

In May 2014, after the Kunming and Ürümqi attacks, Beijing launched a “Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism” in Xinjiang. Religious expression was increasingly treated as a sign of “extremism”: long beards, veils, fasting at Ramadan for officials and students, and religious names for children were restricted.^•

In August 2016 Chen Quanguo, who had overseen a security build-up in Tibet, became Party secretary of Xinjiang. Tens of thousands of police were recruited, “convenience police stations” were built every few hundred metres in cities, and checkpoints scanned faces and phones. Over a million officials were sent to stay in Uyghur homes under a “Becoming Family” programme to monitor them.^•

From early 2017, very large numbers of Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Turkic Muslims were taken to newly built or converted facilities. In 2018 a UN committee cited credible reports that up to a million or more people were held; researchers such as Adrian Zenz estimated more than a million at the peak. Leaked internal documents, the “China Cables” and the “Xinjiang Papers”, published in 2019, described locked, guarded facilities with points systems for “behaviour” and orders to “prevent escapes”.^•

Two descriptions

China at first denied the camps existed, then in 2018–19 described them as voluntary “vocational education and training centres” where students learned Mandarin, law and skills, and in December 2019 announced that all trainees had graduated.^•

Erasing the visible

Australian researchers estimated in 2020 that around 16,000 mosques had been damaged or destroyed since 2017, along with many shrines and cemeteries. Kashgar’s old city had already been largely rebuilt from 2009. Uyghur-language education was cut back in favour of Mandarin-medium schooling and boarding schools, and many children of detained parents were placed in state care.^•

Government statistics showed birth rates in Uyghur-majority areas falling sharply after 2017, as authorities enforced birth-control rules with IUDs and sterilisations, according to an Associated Press investigation; China says it simply applied the same family-planning rules to all.^•

The verdicts

In 2021 the US government declared that China was committing genocide and crimes against humanity, and an independent, unofficial Uyghur Tribunal in London concluded that birth-prevention measures amounted to genocide. In August 2022 the UN human-rights office published its assessment, finding serious human rights violations that “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity”. China rejected the report, and in October the UN Human Rights Council narrowly voted against holding a debate on it.^•

Prominent scholars and artists, including the ethnographer Rahile Dawut and the economist Ilham Tohti, are serving life sentences. Beijing says Xinjiang is now stable, prosperous and open to tourists; Uyghurs abroad say their relatives are still too afraid to speak.^•

Why it matters today