The following is a first-person account from Liu Yuliang, who holds a master’s in international politics from Xinjiang University and previously worked as a civil servant, first in the social-insurance administration bureau in Shihezi City, and later as part of the road administration bureau. The latter frequently sent its staff to villages in Hotan as part of the “visit, benefit, unite” program, with Liu also being selected and sent to a village in Qaraqash County’s Qarasay Municipality as a poverty-alleviation cadre.
We have been able to verify Liu’s identity and background independently. While the exact details of his account cannot be independently corroborated at this time, they are consistent with all the other information available to us, and it is our professional opinion that the account is genuine. As such, it offers an important description of life in southern Xinjiang in 2018-2019, at the height of the incarcerations, from someone inside the system.
Also available in: 中文
In 2014, after the overarching goal of maintaining stability and long-term peace in Xinjiang was officially proposed, a social movement centered around this goal was carried out throughout the region and essentially amounted to a “great purge”. In the southern Xinjiang prefectures, a large number of Uyghur people were detained for ideological reform and sent to concentration camps, called “education and training centers” by the authorities. Countless families, especially those from low-income rural areas, were forced to endure separation from their loved ones.
I was stationed in Ghaz’eghil Village, a larger administrative village close to the center of the local municipality (I can no longer recall the exact population of the village, possibly over two thousand people). We were stationed in the village committee compound. The work team consisted of seven cadres, with a division director cadre serving as the village’s First Secretary. The village-stay work had two main directions: one for comprehensive governance, aimed at maintaining stability, and another, economic, for poverty alleviation. Of these, comprehensive governance was the priority, with poverty alleviation secondary. Although the authorities claimed that both tasks were equally important, it was clear that poverty alleviation was not as crucial as “detaining and rectifying people”.
The tasks of comprehensive governance were onerous, and involved screening each villager, labeling them, and managing them in categories. I remember that for the villagers identified as problematic, there was a total of seven categories. The comprehensive governance was primarily overseen by the First Secretary stationed in the village, who was assisted by the village secretary/chairperson, while the work team’s comprehensive-governance full-time cadres and the village committee’s public-security director executed the specific tasks. During the busiest times, meetings were held every night to discuss the problematic villagers’ prior misdeeds. It was also in these meetings that decisions were made to either open cases against these villagers or send them to training. Perhaps realizing that this was inherently something that “shouldn’t see the light of day”, all of the villages coincidentally and unanimously excluded young cadres who had received higher education from attending these meetings.
After each meeting, the proposed lists were reported up the chain to the county-level political-and-legal department for approval. The process involved no judicial departments with a trial and presentation of evidence, relying solely on the snippets of speech from the village cadres that were recorded during the meeting discussions. For example, that “so-and-so said bad things about the Communist Party one year in the fields” or that “so-and-so attended an underground religious class at some place one year”. Clearly, these snippets of speech would not withstand any judicial scrutiny.
Then came the arrest or being sent to training.
Arrests were frequent. Sometimes, they happened during the large villager meetings held in the courtyard of the village committee. Under various pretexts, the villagers would be summoned to the village committee courtyard almost daily. It didn’t matter if it was night or day, or if they were elderly or children – when the need arose, the notice would be delivered very clearly through the loudspeakers located in every corner of the village. The authorities were fond of staging arrests during these meetings, so as to create fear and deter the public, and I have personally witnessed such arrests three or four times.
Once was during a meeting convened in the municipality around dawn. After all of the municipality’s work teams and village committee staff had arrived, the municipality secretary demanded in a threatening tone that all individuals turn off their mobile phones and refrain from taking pictures. Amid the suffocating silence that followed, there was a faint sound of chains that came from the first floor and could be heard scraping the terrazzo surface, growing increasingly sharp and clear. We then saw two police staff, equipped with riot gear, escorting a lady dressed in red, a black hood over her head, into the meeting hall. Several clear footprints were visible on the lady’s chest. Her arms were restrained behind her back, with her head pressed down and her upper body bent at a ninety-degree angle to her lower body, creating a chilling scene that is difficult to forget.
And what crime had this lady in red committed? The municipality’s Party Committee Secretary solemnly explained that she, despite being a municipality cadre, had prayed in one of the villagers’ homes while carrying out the “visit, benefit, unite” tasks, had been reported by villagers, and was now formally arrested, with a case to be opened against her. The constitution clearly stipulates that citizens have the freedom to practice religion and the freedom not to practice religion, and praying is a compulsory practice for Muslims. Such arrests, in blatant violation of both law and common sense, occurred frequently.
The authorities also hired domestic technology companies to develop all sorts of computer programs and mobile applications, which when coupled with the surveillance cameras and checkpoints that were scattered throughout the streets and alleys, enabled them to closely monitor the movements of every single Uyghur, and to respond immediately to the movements of focus individuals, with the entire Xinjiang region akin to an open-air prison. As the then Party Committee Secretary of Qaraqash County stated during a county-wide teleconference: “There are no secrets in Xinjiang. All the most advanced equipment in the country is here.”
Let’s come back to the so-called “education and training” work. For me, this job marked the beginning of the disenchantment with the Communist Party.
The vocational skills education-and-training centers are not so-called “schools” at all, but essentially another form of prison – a concentration camp – to supplement the already overcrowded prisons, confining those who do not meet the criteria for criminal charges but need to be suppressed nonetheless. If it were a school, then why would there be electric fences, or iron wire? Why would you need solitary confinement rooms? Why would you need guards?
With prisons all over Xinjiang overcrowded and unable to accommodate more convicts, many people were sent there, to undergo investigation. For their families, being sent there meant disappearing without a trace. The authorities, using the “fight for an early return home” idea as bait, would encourage the “students” to provide information and even report on each other. As a result, some people, after arriving there, would be reported and found guilty of “serious” crimes, and would go from being “sent to training” to being “taken into custody”.
Most people spent at least two years here, during which they were not allowed to contact their families, let alone being allowed to go home. I don’t know what life inside was like, since not everyone was allowed to visit the education-and-training centers. However, according to those team members who have visited, the Uyghurs inside faced abuse, violence, and even death.
Once, I was assigned to send a sent-to-training individual to training, not knowing at the time that it meant taking him to the education-and-training center. I’ve forgotten his name, but I remember that he was an auxiliary police officer in the village, specifically assisting the sole village police officer in carrying out his duties. From what I heard, he was sent to training because his father had sent him to an underground scripture-study venue as a teenager (underground scripture-study venue: an unregistered religious class run by an imam).
It was late at night, around ten o’clock, and I was visiting a village home when the First Secretary phoned me and summoned me back for an important assignment. Back at the village committee, everyone was in the yard talking, but the mood felt inexplicably depressive and sad. The First Secretary had me get into the work car, and through the window I saw the man who was being sent to training and his wife, who was pregnant. She was weeping, and the man was also very upset, as they said their goodbyes. I suppose that this might have been a farewell privilege that he could enjoy only by virtue of being an auxiliary police officer, since most of the sendings to training were done quietly at night. That way, the village would wake up the next morning without noticing which of its residents had gone missing.
After the couple parted, the man got in the car, followed by two burly men who “protected” him. Our vehicle then drove towards the county seat. You wouldn’t see many cars on the road in southern Xinjiang at midnight, but the majority of those you did were heading in the same direction, because these cars carried the individuals being “sent to training” from the various villages that night. Following the others, our car pulled up to the side of the road in proper order. Parked one after another were green public transport buses – the ones found only in the county seat. The coming and going, and the boarding and alighting, of people broke the silence of the night. Each bus was filled with people, all of whom were about to be sent to the education and training center, and included men, women, young and old.
It was at that moment that it really hit me. With the authorities repeatedly claiming that sending people to training was an important de-radicalization measure, I couldn’t help but ask: if this is such a good thing, why do it in the middle of the night? It was also at that moment that I suddenly understood why, on the way back from a late-night visit to a villager’s home, a woman suddenly ran out from the village entrance, waving and crying as a green bus drove away. That bus, too, had probably been heading to the education-and-training center.
This sending to training was essentially illegal deprivation of freedom, done without any judicial trial, devoid of both procedural justice and outcome justice. I do not know how many people were sent to the education-and-training centers, but I do believe that this was a tragedy enacted nightly on the lands of the four southern Xinjiang prefectures, with the peaceful lives of countless families shattered, the families torn apart, and in some cases even separated by life and death. Because for some families this farewell would be the final one.
With regard to poverty alleviation: as I was a poverty-alleviation full-time cadre, let me briefly share my feelings regarding this work. Most of the time, my job involved creating and submitting various forms, revolving around data and numbers and meant to deal with inspections at all levels. The authorities believed that round after round of data collection and submission could achieve refined results that were very close to accurate.
Everyone wanted a share of the poverty-alleviation funds, and barely anything would be left of the amounts allocated by the central government by the time they had been passed down through the various levels, with the amount reaching the village level barely sufficient. The corruption under the Communist Party system was ubiquitous and pervasive. The Party members and cadres, while shouting about anti-corruption and integrity, would not hesitate when it came to cashing in. The simplest form of corruption was based in the living expenses of the work team, amounting to over 200000RMB annually, and in the poverty-alleviation funds, amounting to over 300000RMB. The leaders of the work team would collude with the local material suppliers to overreport, or to falsify reports, and would then divide up the funds at the end of the year.
There were also various dedicated poverty-alleviation funds, which the leaders were quick to seize for themselves, through misappropriation of project funds, wordplay, and other methods. For example, the state would allocate dedicated poverty-alleviation funds for the purchase of cattle, sheep, and other livestock, so that these may be distributed to the villagers. But in my experience, it went like this:
People at the municipality would first contact the relevant merchants to make centralized purchases of cattle and sheep, with low-value lambs being sent to the farmers they were destined for. Meanwhile, calves worth up to 20000RMB each would be forcibly left in the care of suppliers under the pretext that the villagers did not understand breeding. Under this model, the villagers, who neither understood Chinese nor dared to assert their rights, were ultimately forced to accept the arrangement and that was that, de facto depriving the farmers of ownership of the cattle.
Put briefly, the various methods and means of corruption were countless and shocking.
In what concerns forced labor: In 2021, the Trump administration identified there being massive human rights violations and acts of forced labor in the Xinjiang region. Having studied, worked, and lived in Xinjiang for over ten years, I can deeply understand the comprehensive discrimination in education, employment, and daily life that the Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities face. I have participated in many recruitment exams, and the 2015 Xinjiang local functionary recruitment exam and the construction corps functionary recruitment exam that I took part in had about 27000 to 28000 positions. In the vast majority of cases, the Uyghurs had absolutely no competitive ability because of their mother tongue not being Chinese, making it very difficult for them to pass the exam and move on to the second phase.
When even official recruitment is like this, what’s there to say for the large numbers of social-recruitment positions, where most enterprises explicitly refuse Uyghurs? Though Uyghurs and other minorities make up the majority of Xinjiang’s native population, the Han, who are the main ethnic group of the People’s Republic of China, control Xinjiang’s social and economic resources.
Once the authorities realized that poverty might be a reason for the challenges to social stability in Xinjiang, they attempted to use administrative measures and force enterprises to employ Uyghurs. As a result, a large number of Uyghurs were organized by the authorities to go to northern Xinjiang and inner China for labor. These groups are usually overseen by one or two individuals acting as team leaders, who are then responsible for monitoring and managing the workers. In some enterprises that receive Uyghur workers, it was arranged that the Uyghurs live and eat separately, with the team leaders instructing them to avoid contact with locals and to not answer questions about the current situation in Xinjiang.
On the surface, venturing out for work brings Uyghurs income. But at the same time, no one cares about the problems that this model creates, such as spouses having to live apart and the issues with parenting. If better resources were available, who wouldn’t prefer to choose their employment freely and work closer to home? Being gathered for organized employment is in itself a form of coercion.
Participating in village-stay work is perhaps the most meaningful choice I have made in my life, despite it being a choice that caused drastic shifts in my life – plunging me, my family, and my relatives into hardship, and even facing the threat of imprisonment. Three years of the pandemic, repeated lockdowns and restraints, endless PCR tests, and even the three departments of public security, procuratorates, and courts trampling on the law, working in unison to issue documents to threaten and intimidate residents who were unwilling to undergo PCR testing. Across China’s territory, swathes of businesses closed their doors while police service stations continued to be built. I am certain that Xinjiang’s governance model will be promoted and replicated nationwide. Because the Communist Party needs to do this, as does the dictator.
Today, as I sit on a park bench in the United States of America, my troubles and pain persist, but I am grateful for this experience, as it has greatly enriched my life, allowing me – a person keen on politics – to fully transform my understanding of the Chinese Communist Party. Perhaps there is no perfect system in this world. Still, speaking relatively, I believe that the Chinese people deserve a better system, as do the Uyghur people. A new system under which the people will no longer feel afraid and helpless, under which they will no longer feel oppressed and restrained.