Firstly, I would like to thank the chair and the Subcommittee on International Human Rights for inviting me to testify.
The research performed by others and myself conclusively shows the existence of a large-scale extrajudicial detention network for the purpose of subjecting Xinjiang's Muslim minorities, but also some ethnic Christians, to intensive political re-education and indoctrination procedures.
The evidence I gathered largely comes from the Chinese government itself. A detailed account of my research, including on police recruitments and the installation of surveillance systems, is publicly available.
In August 2018, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination accused China of detaining over one million Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, in extrajudicial re-education camps. China flatly denied the existence of re-education camps, with the representative Hu Lianhe arguing that criminals “involved only in minor offences” are assigned “to vocational education and employment training centres to acquire employment skills and legal knowledge”.
In a recent interview, Xinjiang's governor Shohrat Zakir likewise acknowledged that those “suspected of minor criminal offences” are “provided...with free vocational training through vocational education institutions”. Successful trainees can receive “certificates of completion”.
However, a recent amendment to Xinjiang's de-extremification ordinance specifically refers to vocational skills training centres as re-education institutions: in Chinese, [Witness speaks Mandarin], a term that Hu Lianhe and Shohrat Zakir carefully avoid in their statements.
Recently, the Xinjiang government launched a publicity initiative talking about vocational skills training to help rescue ignorant, backward and poor rural minorities. A related TV clip was produced and shown on Chinese television, CCTV. However, these accounts are highly selective. Footage only shows the top of a building, without showing us the surrounding extensive security features. Footage of a classroom, however, shows no less than five security cameras in the back. The statements of several internees come across very stilted, with major discrepancies between their words and their body language, in some ways reminiscent of false confessions. Much of what is said on that TV clip appears to have been memorized beforehand.
From public bid documents, we know that many of these training camps were commissioned with extensive security features. Similar features such as high fences, walls, watchtowers and so on, are visible from satellite footage of the possible location of the facility featured on this TV program. Bid documents also indicate a clear link between vocational skills training of this type...which I would clearly differentiate from proper or genuine, or professional vocational education.
Some of these facilities have been commissioned with hundreds of police and police stations located either nearby or on the facility. Some of these compounds have a re-education facility, using the actual term for political re-education, whose history can be traced to the former, and now abolished, nationwide re-education-through-labour system and these supposed skills-training facilities.
It is disconcerting, especially in the statements of Xinjiang's governor and of the CCTV piece that was produced, the portrayal of the Uighurs' poor farmers, who are supposedly naturally inclined towards extremism just because they are not wage labourers who speak Chinese well or are tightly integrated into mainstream society. This particular perspective is driven by communist materialist ideology that presumes that with improved material conditions, all human beings will naturally tend toward atheism or naturalism. However, since religious belief has been persisting and deepening among many Chinese minorities—even the Han majority, and especially among Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, also in response to what they perceive as ethnocultural discrimination, the authorities have, step by step, increased their securitization drive.
China does face a credible terrorism threat from a fairly small number of Uighur groups who, from what we can tell, have by now been neutralized and disbanded. The present re-education campaign represents a severe and extensive violation of the most basic human rights, which is not only unlikely to achieve the stated aim of deradicalization but is also quite likely to deepen and promote new radicalization among Muslim populations in Xinjiang who previously had no affinity with extremist ideology.
First, I encourage the Government of Canada to publicly name and to condemn Xinjiang's re-education campaign. I encourage the government to not exclusively rely on quiet or vector diplomacy, which would in my opinion ultimately not make a difference. Second, I would encourage the government to not extradite back to China any Muslim from Xinjiang who is currently in Canada, because of the present human rights concerns.
Thank you.