Jaga,
To me it looks like the times of Stalin. The Gulag system (Main Administration of Camps), the Soviet forced-labor camp-system that was set up under Vladimir Lenin and reached its peak during Joseph Stalin's rule from the 1930s to the early 1950s. And today it reminds me of the concentration camps that exist in North Korea. The North Korean internment camps are located in central and northeastern North Korea. They comprise many prison labor colonies in secluded mountain valleys, completely isolated from the outside world. These internment camps are for people accused of political offences or denounced as politically unreliable are run by the state security department.
The re-education camps for criminals are run by the interior ministry. There is a fluent passage between common crimes and political crimes, because people who get on the bad side of influential partisans are often denounced on the basis of false accusations. They are then sent to detention centers, threatened with brutal torture and forced to make false confessions (Lee Soon-ok, for example, had to kneel down whilst being showered with water at icy temperatures with other prisoners, of whom six did not survive) and are then condemned in a brief show trial to a long-term prison sentence. In North Korea, political crimes are greatly varied, from border crossing to any disturbance of the political order, and they are rigorously punished. Due to the dire prison conditions with hunger and torture, a large percentage of prisoners do not survive their sentence term.
Re-education camps in North KoreaThe re-education camps are large prison building complexes surrounded by high walls. The plight of the prisoners is quite similar to that in the political prison camps. They have to perform slave labour in prison factories. If they do not meet the work quota, they are tortured and (at least in Kaechon camp) confined for many days to special prison cells, too small to stand up or lie full-length in.
In distinction from the internment camps for political prisoners, the re-education camp prisoners are instructed ideologically after work and are forced to memorize speeches of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il and to undergo self-criticism rites. Many prison inmates are guilty of common crimes penalized also in other countries, but often they were committed out of economic necessity, e.g. illegal border crossing, stealing food or illegal trading.
There are around 15–20 reeducation camps in North Korea.
Two camps are documented with coordinates, satellite images and testimonies of former prisoners.
Jaga, I will not compare the Chinese practice to other regimes who had an official xenophobic, ethnocentric, racist and one state policy, glorification of the state and the leader, because this is uniquely Chinese. Fact is that this is very worrisome. Because the
Atheist,
Communist,
Chinese Nationalist government is
playing the ethnic card here and is being busy with
ethnic cleansing,
the persecution and
systematic oppression of a religious minority. These are gross human rights abuses and violations of the Geneva Convention on Human Rights. Today they target the ethnic Turkic Muslim Uyghurs from the so called
Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of
the People’s Republic of China and the
Tibetan Buddhists in
Tibet, tomorrow they might target
Chinese Roman-Catholics and
Chinese Protestant christians. But by large infiltration, influx and thus import of
Han Chinese people the Chinese try to
Sinicizatize the
Uyghurs by enforcing
Han Chinese settlements,
Han Chinese cities,
Han Chinese culture and these
Han Chinese soldier farmers on their Xinjiang land.
SinicizationSinicization, sinicisation, sinofication, or sinification is a process whereby non-Chinese societies come under the influence of
Chinese culture, particularly
Han Chinese culture and
societal norms. Areas of influence include diet, writing, industry, education, language, law, lifestyle, politics, philosophy, religion, science and technology, culture, and value systems. More broadly, "
Sinicization" may refer to policies of acculturation, assimilation, or
cultural imperialism imposed by China onto neighboring
East Asian countries. Evidence of this can be seen in the value systems, cuisine, architectural style, and lexicons.
Xinjiang historyThe Hui Muslim 36th Division (
of the National Revolutionary Army of the the Nationalist Party of China Kuomintang) governed
southern Xinjiang in
1934–
1937. The administration that was set up was
colonial in nature, putting up street signs and names in
Chinese, which used to be in only
Uighur language. They lived much like
Han Chinese, importing
Han cooks and
baths.
The Hui also switched carpet patterns from
Uyghur to
Han in state owned carpet factories.
Turkic soldiers waving Kuomintang flags near Kumul.The 36th Division was a cavalry division in
the National Revolutionary Army. It was created in 1932 by the
Kuomintang for General
Ma Zhongying, who was also its first commander. It was made almost entirely out of Hui Muslim troops, all of its officers were Hui, with a few thousand Uighurs forced conscripts in the rank and file. It was commonly referred to as the "
KMT 36th Division", or "
Tungan 36th Division".
Watched by uighur woman with child, tungan troops drill at Khotan 1937 36th division drilling in Khotan in 1937.Sinocentrism, the ideology that
China is the cultural, political and/or economic center of the world might have to do with the present situation.
Uighur people (Encyclopaedia Britannica)
Let the mostly Uyghur people of southern Xinjiang, especially the young, have something to do and money to earn, Li Keqiang told the region's top officials. Photo: internetUighur, Chinese (Pinyin) Weiwu’er, also spelled Uygur or Uyghur, a Turkic-speaking people of interior Asia. Uighurs live for the most part in northwestern China, in the Uygur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang; a small number live in the Central Asian republics. There were some 10,000,000 Uighurs in China and at least a combined total of 300,000 in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan in the early 21st century.
The Uighur language is part of the Turkic group of Altaic languages, and the Uighurs are among the oldest Turkic-speaking peoples of Central Asia. They are mentioned in Chinese records from the 3rd century ce. They first rose to prominence in the 8th century, when they established a kingdom along the Orhon River in what is now north-central Mongolia. In 840 this state was overrun by the Kyrgyz, however, and the Uighurs migrated southwestward to the area around the Tien (Tian) Shan (“Celestial Mountains”). There the Uighurs formed another independent kingdom in the Turfan Depression region, but this was overthrown by the expanding Mongols in the 13th century.
The Uighurs are mainly a sedentary village-dwelling people who live in the network of oases formed in the valleys and lower slopes of the Tien Shan, Pamirs, and related mountain systems. The region is one of the most arid in the world; hence, for centuries they have practiced irrigation to conserve their water supply for agriculture. Their principal food crops are wheat, corn (maize), kaoliang (a form of sorghum), and melons. The chief industrial crop is cotton, which has long been grown in the area. Many Uighurs are employed in petroleum extraction, mining, and manufacturing in urban centres.
Women wearing traditional Uighur clothes in the city of Kashgar in the Chinese Xinjiang province.The chief Uighur cities are Ürümqi, the capital of Xinjiang, and Kashgar (Kashi), an ancient centre of trade on the historic Silk Road near the border between Russia and China. The Uighurs have lacked political unity in recent centuries, except for a brief period during the 19th century when they were in revolt against Beijing. Their social organization is centred on the village. The Uighurs of Xinjiang are Sunni Muslims.
Large numbers of Han (ethnic Chinese) began moving into Xinjiang after the establishment of the autonomous region in the 1950s. The influx became especially pronounced after 1990, and by the early 20th century the Han constituted two-fifths of Xinjiang’s total population. Over time economic disparities and ethnic tensions grew between the Uighur and Han populations that eventually resulted in protests and other disturbances. A particularly violent outbreak occurred in July 2009, mainly in Ürümqi, in which it was reported that nearly 200 people (mostly Han) were killed and some 1,700 were injured. Violent incidents increased after that and included attacks by knife-wielding assailants and by suicide bombers. Chinese authorities responded by cracking down on Uighurs suspected of being dissidents and separatists. The authorities’ actions included shootings, arrests, and long jail sentences until 2017, when the Chinese government initiated a thorough crackdown on Uighurs in Xinjiang. Citing a need for greater security, the government set up cameras, checkpoints, and constant police patrols in Uighur-dominated areas. The most controversial governmental undertaking—which was met by protests from human-rights organizations—was the indefinite detention of up to one million Uighurs in “political training centres,” heavily fortified buildings that were likened to the reeducation camps of the Mao Zedong era. In August 2018 the United Nations called upon China to end the detention, but government officials denied the existence of the camps.
Detainees listening to speeches in a Uyghur Re-education camp in Lop County, Xinjiang, April 2017. Pieter
Sources: Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, the New York Times, Al Jazeera, BBC and my own (Pieter's) historical knowledge and writing.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps
