As many as one million Muslims are being held in extralegal political  indoctrination or “re-education” camps in Xinjiang. The camps are part of China’s “strike hard against violent terrorism” campaign that was launched in 2014 in response to a series of violent incidents involving ethnic Uyghur and Han Chinese. While authorities have attributed the violence to Uyghur separatists and religious extremists, critics argue that the state’s repressive policies in the region are the root cause of unrest. Restrictions on Islam have affected all forms of religiosity, including Islamic dress, halal food, and fasting for Ramadan. Last year, officials banned parents from naming their newborns Jihad, Imam, Medina and Mohammed, among other Muslim names with religious overtones. New legislation was also passed in March 2017 prohibiting “abnormal” beards and the wearing of veils in public places. Cash reward systems for information on illegal religious and separatist activities have been set up in the region to incentivize whistler blowers.

Reports of the Chinese government’s mass arbitrary detention and mistreatment of Muslims have provoked widespread international condemnation. Lawmakers in the United States have authored a bill that would, if passed, place sanctions on officials and companies linked to alleged human rights abuses taking place in the region. The U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has called on China to release all Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities held in the camps. The plight of China’s Turkic Muslims has further sparked outcry in the Islamic world as local citizens protest in solidarity. Despite growing criticism from all sides, China has rejected all accusations of misconduct, arguing that the camps function as job training and legal education centers. Last week, the Xinjiang regional legislature amended a law which attempts to justify the detention centers as “vocational training centers.”

Although the current crackdown in Xinjiang and the resulting police state is unprecedented in its scope and sophistication, China’s oppression in the region and its suspicion of its non-Han minorities has a long history. From CNN’s James Griffiths:

During the Sino-Soviet split, there was a deep fear in Beijing that Moscow would seek to annex Xinjiang, which bordered the then Soviet Union, or encourage ethnic minority groups to rebel.

This was a very real possibility: during the 1930s and 40s, as the short-lived Nationalist government fought a civil war with the Communists and faced a growing threat of Japanese invasion, two breakaway East Turkestan Republics were declared and swiftly put down in Xinjiang.

[…] Chinese officials argue that without a firm hand, the country’s far west risks turning into another Syria, where rebel groups and Islamist militants backed by foreign powers, including the US, have plunged the country into a years-long civil war.

This narrative has been used to justify not only restrictions on Islam, but the massive securitization of Xinjiang, with armed police manning checkpoints across cities, surveillance cameras everywhere, and citizens unable to leave the region. [Source]

At The New York Times, Chris Buckley uncovers documents that point to President Xi Jinping and other senior Communist Party leaders as the key orchestrators behind the rapid expansion of systemic detention and forced political indoctrination in Xinjiang.

Mr. Xi has not publicly endorsed or commented on the camps, but he ordered a major shift in policy soon after visiting Xinjiang in 2014 to weaken Uighurs’ separate identity and assimilate them into a society dominated by the Han majority, according to the documents.

[…] Mr. Xi made his first and only visit as national leader to Xinjiang in April 2014. Hours after his four-day visit ended, assailants used bombs and knives to kill three people and wound nearly 80 others near a train station in Urumqi, the regional capital. The attack was seen as a rebuff to Mr. Xi, who had just left the city and vowed to wield an “iron fist” against Uighurs who oppose Chinese rule.

[…] A month later, Mr. Xi called for a vigorous push to make Uighurs loyal members of the Chinese nation through Chinese-language instruction, economic incentives and state-organized ethnic intermingling. The leadership also approved a directive on establishing tighter control of Xinjiang that has not been made public.

[…] In the year after Mr. Xi’s visit to Xinjiang, the documents show, the party began building “transformation through education” camps to warn Muslim minorities of the evils of religious zealotry and ethnic separatism. [Source]

Xi’s shifting policy priorities aligns with the heavy-handed approach to ethnic issues advocated by a group of Chinese scholars and officials, whose academic writings have contributed to the party’s turn towards radical repression in Xinjiang. At China Brief, La Trobe University’s James Leibold profiles Hu Lianhe, a government researcher and “one of the leading figures of a new generation of PRC ethnic policymakers” whose academic publications have had a significant impact on China’s current Xinjiang policy.

Hu Lianhe’s academic research is preoccupied with the question of social stability. He helped pioneer the study of terrorism and counter-terrorism in China, publishing three influential books on the topic, where he analyzes much of the Western literature and discussion about terrorism following the 9/11 attacks. He then widened the scope of his research to explore other sources of instability, such as economic inequality, religious belief, criminality, corruption and mass incidents.

He claims to have developed a scientific and comprehensive “theory of stability.” For Hu, the maintenance of stability requires a broader focus than material and economic development, one that incorporates the ways political, cultural, spiritual, and ideological issues also affect stability. Ultimately, stability requires the “standardizing of human behaviour” (规范人的行为) in order to achieve the perfect state of harmony (Beijing Ribao, 13 July 2010). When viewed as a “comprehensive systems engineering project” (全面的系统工程), stability can be literally manufactured through the right blend of governance tools, with rule by law (法治) being the most important instrument.

[…] Through his study of instability, Hu developed an interest in the “ethnic question” (民族问题) and the challenge of maintaining stability in “terrorist-prone” regions like Xinjiang and Tibet, where “hostile foreign forces seek to split China.” With co-author Hu Angang, he wrote a number of controversial articles beginning in late 2011 calling for a major rethink of ethnic policy in China, what they labelled a “second generation of ethnic policies” (Aisixiang, 20 October 2011).

[…] Reflecting his security background, Hu Lianhe frequently warns against complacency, and calls on Party officials to “wake-up” (清醒), increase their “worrying mentality” (忧患意识), and blaze new policy trails. In his writing, sources of potential instability are everywhere. Yet, with their unique geographic, religious, and ethnic profiles, frontier regions like Tibet and Xinjiang are particularly vulnerable, and a “grave and present danger” to national security and the realization of the “China Dream.” [Source]