Liu Xiaobo, renowned literary critic and former professor of Chinese literature who helped negotiate the safe departure of students from Tiananmen Square on June 4, , was seized at his home on October 7, and administratively sentenced to a three-year reeducation term the following day.
As mentioned, those administratively sentenced are technically not criminals and neither they nor their children may be discriminated against when it comes to employment or school enrollment.
Article 10 of a government document called Trial Implementation Methods lists the "categories of persons" to be "taken in for reeducation through labor. All the offenses described can be judicially prosecuted if sufficiently serious, but no specific distinction between those acts deemed minor and those which can be "pursued for criminal responsibility" has ever been made.
The first category listed refers to "counterrevolutionary elements" and those who are against the communist party and socialism. Often such dissidents are held on trumped-up charges such as "hooliganism" or "disturbing the social order.
Those not eligible for reeducation include mental patients, the blind, the deaf and dumb, the retarded, the severely ill, those who cannot take part in labor, and pregnant women or those whose children are not yet one year old and are being breast fed. Bishop Zeng Jingmu, the seventy-eight-year-old Catholic Bishop of Yujiang diocese, Jiangxi province, was sentenced to a three-year "reeducation through labor" term on March 18, for "violating administrative norms," and for "irresponsibly organizing illegal meetings," that is religious assemblies and masses not sanctioned by the government's official Chinese Catholic Church.
Too old to work like other prisoners, he was held in a facility housing detainees awaiting sentencing until his release in May The Administrative Procedure Law provides for challenges to reeducation through labor decisions by appeal to the people's court. The court has the power to order a person's release, but apparently the number of cases overturned on appeal is minuscule; and there is some evidence that a challenge may be regarded as evidence of a person's lack of amenability to reeducation.
Liu Xiaobo, for example, spent five months in a reeducation camp before his appeal was even heard and denied. Liu Nianchun, a veteran labor activist who received a three-year reeducation sentence for his participation in a petition campaign at the time of the sixth anniversary of June 4, , finally had an appeal hearing heard sixteen months after he "disappeared.
In theory, reeducation camps and reform through labor camps are significantly different. Those in reeducation are paid for their work but they must supply their own clothing and bedding.
Part of an inmates' income may be used for support of their dependents or reserved for their own use after release. Inmates are to work no more than six hours a day and study no more than three, and they are entitled to eight hours' sleep each night and rest on Sundays and during festivals. Regulations provide for "awards for achievement and punishment for The reward should be big and the punishment should be light.
The cases of Liu Nianchun; Zhou Guoqiang, a labor rights activist and lawyer; and Gao Feng, a religious dissident, all had their sentences extended days for Zhou and for the others for failure to reform. When Liu protested and began a hunger strike on May 22, he reportedly was thrown into a small dark punishment cell, denied sufficient water, and tortured with electric shocks. The international publicity given to the cases may have accounted for reversals of the extensions for Zhou and Gao.
Liu Nianchun, due for release on May 20, , was still in prison as of June The camp's commanders set aside a room for torture, Sauytbay relates, which the inmates dubbed the black room because it was forbidden to talk about it explicitly.
Some prisoners were hung on the wall and beaten with electrified truncheons. There were prisoners who were made to sit on a chair of nails. I saw people return from that room covered in blood. Some came back without fingernails. On one occasion, Sauytbay herself was punished.
She spotted me as being Kazakh and asked for my help. She begged me to get her out of there, and she embraced me. I did not reciprocate her embrace, but I was punished anyway. I was beaten and deprived of food for two days. Sauytbay says she witnessed medical procedures being carried out on inmates with no justification.
She thinks they were done as part of human experiments that were carried out in the camp systematically. They were told it was to prevent diseases, but the nurses told me secretly that the pills were dangerous and that I should not take them. Some prisoners were cognitively weakened. Women stopped getting their period and men became sterile. The fate of the women in the camp was particularly harsh, Sauytbay notes: "On an everyday basis the policemen took the pretty girls with them, and they didn't come back to the rooms all night.
The police had unlimited power. They could take whomever they wanted. There were also cases of gang rape. In one of the classes I taught, one of those victims entered half an hour after the start of the lesson. The police ordered her to sit down, but she just couldn't do it, so they took her to the black room for punishment. Tears stream down Sauytbay's face when she tells the grimmest story from her time in the camp.
They took inmates outside, men and women, and told one of the women to confess her sins. She stood before us and declared that she had been a bad person, but now that she had learned Chinese she had become a better person. When she was done speaking, the policemen ordered her to disrobe and simply raped her one after the other, in front of everyone.
While they were raping her, they checked to see how we were reacting. People who turned their head or closed their eyes, and those who looked angry or shocked, were taken away and we never saw them again. It was awful. I will never forget the feeling of helplessness, of not being able to help her.
After that happened, it was hard for me to sleep at night. Sayragul Sauytbay's story took a surprising turn in March , when with no prior announcement she was informed that she was being released. Again her head was covered with a black sack, again she was bundled into a vehicle, but this time she was taken home. At first the orders were clear: She was to resume her former position as director of five preschools in her home region of Aksu, and she was instructed not to say a word about what she had been through.
On her third day back on the job, however, she was fired and again brought in for interrogation. She was accused of treason and of maintaining ties with people abroad.
The punishment for people like her, she was told, was re-education, only this time she would be a regular inmate in a camp and remain there for a period of one to three years. Having already been in a camp, I knew I would die there, and I could not accept that. Sauytbay decided that she was not going back to a camp.
In , for example, riots broke out in Urumqi , the capital of Xinjiang, after Uighurs protested their treatment by the government and the Han majority.
About people were killed and hundreds injured during the unrest. The Chinese government blamed the protests on violent separatist groups, a tactic it would continue to use against the Uighurs and other religious and ethnic minorities across China.
Attacks, some violent , by Uighur separatists have occurred in recent years, and some Uighurs have become foreign fighters, joining groups like ISIS. Gladney, a professor of anthropology at Pomona College in Claremont, California, who studies the region, told me.
China has a dark history with reeducation camps , combining hard labor with indoctrination to the party line. In , Xinjiang also got a new leader: a powerful Communist Party boss named Chen Quanguo , whose previous job was restoring order and control to the restive region of Tibet.
Chen has a reputation as a strongman and is something of a specialist in ethnic crackdowns. The United States placed human rights sanctions on Chen and other Chinese officials in Xinjiang earlier this month. Every square has a police station that keeps tabs on the inhabitants.
So, in rural areas, does every village. Security checkpoints where residents must scan identification cards were set up at train stations and on roads into and out of towns. Chinese officials also reportedly took blood and DNA samples , framed as mandatory check-ups. Police confiscate phones to download the information contained on them to scan through later or track Uighurs through their cellphones. Police have also confiscated passports to prevent Uighurs from traveling abroad.
Uighurs abroad say their families are targeted by Chinese officials, part of a pressure campaign to keep the diaspora from speaking out. In October , Radio Free Asia, a news agency backed by the US government, also reported that Han Chinese men were being sent to check in on and sometimes sleep with Uighur women, including those whose husbands were detained in the camps.
Chinese officials have justified these policies as necessary to counter religious radicalization and extremism, but critics say they are explicitly meant to curtail Islamic traditions and practices. Experts estimate as many as 3 million people have disappeared into these camps at some point, with about 1 million currently being held. At first, the Chinese government denied these camps even existed. Instead, the government is trying to cast them as both lawful and innocuous.
But leaked official documents and chilling firsthand accounts from people detained in the camps have helped outside experts and researchers put together a disturbing portrait of the abuses that take place there. These camps are much more like prisons than so-called boarding schools. A report by Agence France-Presse described camps in which thousands of guards carry spiked clubs, tear gas, and stun guns to surveil detainees, who are held in buildings surrounded by razor wire and infrared cameras.
AFP journalists also reviewed public documents showing that government agencies overseeing the camps purchased 2, police batons, electric cattle prods, 1, pairs of handcuffs, and 2, cans of pepper spray.
An investigation by Reuters in also found that, according to satellite imagery, 39 suspected camps almost tripled in size between April and August In , another set of leaked documents revealed how tightly controlled the camps are.
The documents ordered surveillance of dorm rooms and classrooms. Leaked drone footage , believed to be recorded last August, appears to show hundreds of Uighur prisoners, blindfolded and handcuffed, being transferred by train. And there is evidence that China is continuing to expand the detention of the Uighurs, even beyond the re-education camps.
China has claimed since last year that detainees had graduated and been released, rejoining society because their indoctrination program worked.
In August, Buzzfeed News used satellite imagery to document detention facilities built since , one in every county in Xinjiang. According to Buzzfeed, as China sought to detain people, they repurposed government buildings, but, over time, these sites have become fortified, and more and more prison-like.
ASPI documented centers that had been built or expanded since , and at least 60 new facilities have been built or expanded between July and July alone; about half are more heavily securitized facilities — maximum security prisons, basically.
ASPI also found evidence that some of the earlier re-education camps had been decommissioned. The Chinese government continues to target Uighurs outside the camps. In February , a leaked page spreadsheet from Karakax County in Xinjiang showed exactly how Uighur families were tracked by authorities. The spreadsheet contained names of Uighur families, including the identities of people committed to concentration camps, and those whom officials were monitoring.
Some of those being tracked were as young as Among the things that caught the attention of authorities were obtaining a passport whether or not they traveled , praying regularly, or even wearing a beard, according to the New York Times. Family members were monitored for participating in religious ceremonies like funerals or weddings.
Additional research by Zenz and the Associated Press in June bolstered this finding, showing that Chinese officials were systematically trying to stop Uighur women from having children under the threat of internment if they violated the rules.
According to the report:. The state regularly subjects minority women to pregnancy checks, and forces intrauterine devices, sterilization and even abortion on hundreds of thousands, the interviews and data show.
Even while the use of IUDs and sterilization has fallen nationwide, it is rising sharply in Xinjiang. The research backs up anecdotal reports from women detained in the camps, who say they were forced to undergo examinations and abortions.
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